Department of Computer Science

Covid-19 Testing Training

Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) Training for Improving Quality of Care and Patient Safety

<< Return to Virtual Reality Laboratory

Director: Sharad Sharma, Professor, Department of Computer Science

Current Students: Sri Teja Bodempudi (Doctoral Student)

Past Students: Phillip Deveroux, Alicia Miller

Status: Current

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues unabated, socially vulnerable populations face disproportionate risks as is often the case during public health emergencies. Emerging trends of differential impact on socially vulnerable populations, such as certain racial and ethnic minorities, among others, require urgent attention to improve quality of care and patient safety. This project aims to characterize determinants for improving quality of care and patient safety among vulnerable populations, specifically with a focus on racial and ethnic minorities, and fully incorporate these findings into the creation and development of Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) training modules geared for integrated care teams to enhance care delivery. An integrated care team comprised of healthcare practitioners, social workers and care coordinators must work together seamlessly, safely and efficiently. Our goal is to develop virtual reality instructional (VRI) modules to train integrated care team members to engage patients from vulnerable populations safely and efficiently.

With continuing advancements in technology, VR based training incorporates real-life experience and creates a "sense of presence" in the environment. Immersive virtual environments offer considerable advantages over traditional training exercises such as reduction in the time and cost for different what-if scenarios and opportunities for more frequent practice. This research work proposes the development of Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) training modules geared for COVID-19 testing. The VRI modules are developed for immersive, non-immersive, and mobile environment. These VRI modules are developed to help increase safety preparedness and mitigate the social distancing related risks for safety management.

VRI Modules for COVID-19 Testing

VRI Training Module in Oculus for COVID-19 testing

Pedestrian Walk Thru COVID-19 Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) Module for Testing

COVID-19 Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) eLearning and Training Module for Testing

Drive Thru COVID-19 Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) eLearning and Training Module

Screen Shots

Client (left-side) and Server (right-side)

Virtual patient created using Unity 3D gaming engine

 

 

References

Publications

  1. Sharma, S., Bodempudi, S.T., " Virtual Reality Instructional (VRI) module for Training and Patient Safety", IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2021), in the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, Burlingame, California, 26-30 January 2021. (Accepted)
  2. Sharma, S., Bodempudi, S.T., " Situational Awareness of COVID Pandemic data using Virtual Reality", IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2021), in the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality, Burlingame, California, 26-30 January 2021. (Accepted)
  3. Sharma, S., Bodempudi, S.T., " Real-time Data Analytics of COVID Pandemic using Virtual Reality", Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2020), Thematic Area: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, Washington DC, 24-29 July 2021. (Accepted)
  4. Sharma, S, Bodempudi, S.T., Reehl, A. " Real-Time Data Visualization to Enhance Situational Awareness of COVID pandemic ", Proceeding of the IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI'20), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Dec 16-18, 2020.
  5. Rayan, T., Brown,A., Carillo, A., Sharma, S, " The Effect of COVID-19 on Various Racial Demograpics in the United States ", Proceeding of the IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI'20), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Dec 16-18, 2020.